Community Radio Environment Network

Our Earth Week, a UK-wide community radio event in November (timed to coincide with the COP talks) celebrates our interconnectedness with nature, and shines a spotlight on climate breakdown, and what our local communities can do to both prevent it, and adapt to it. Tonight we find out if Our Earth Week has been nominated for an Arias Award! It would be a fitting tribute to all the incredible work done by so many people at radio stations all over the country). Fingers crossed! #Arias #OurEarthWeek

🎙️Dr Karen Tucker brings us her final HOT FROM COP report for @our.earth.week , reflecting on her time in Belem now she has landed back in the UK. 🙏We are so grateful to Karen and all our other #HotFromCOP correspondents- Filipe Franca, Dawda Cham and Thaisa Michelan. As well as being shared on insta, their messages have been broadcast right across our wonderful #CommunityRadioEnvironmentNetwork . 💚 ⚖️ Today Karen tells us about the event she co-hosted with Indigenous colleagues, other academics and NGO representatives. The discussion underlined the importance of basing forest protection around #IndigenousRights, #TerritorialGovernance and #DirectFinancing mechanisms. 🌳Karen also talks about working with the #Mapuche People of Southern Chile and how this has informed her understanding of the need to preserve forests . 🌎 We hear about the Global Ethical Stocktake - an initiative led by Brazil’s President Lula and Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN- aiming to put justice and social/ethical concerns at the heart of the COP agenda. ✊Karen also reflects on the Indigenous protests that have taken place in Belém in the last week. She sees them as motivated by the disconnect between ‘walk’ and the ‘talk’ at COP regarding Indigenous Peoples and the protection of global forests. Both have been given lots of visibility at COP30 - in the programming, branding and identity - but Indigenous Peoples have barely any power in the negotiations and forests continue to be lost around the world. 🇬🇧 Dr KAREN TUCKER is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Bristol University in the UK, with a special interest in decolonising approaches to Indigenous perspectives. #COP30 #OurEarthWeek2025 #OurEarthWeek #ConnectInspireAct #CabotInstitute #CabotInstituteForTheEnvironment #FPIC #CarbonMarkets #IndigenousAlternatives @bristoluni_cabot_institute @culturedeclares @morningbird43 @gabysolly1 @iamdawdacham @ecofilipe

🛟 CLIMATE CHANGE AND WATER 🛟 🌱Slow the flow of water where you live and support local wildlife by joining the #Depave movement! ✊ 🧱 Hard surfaces increase flooding, and local flooding is increasing everywhere with climate change. 🪏Could you take up paving stones and replace with plants somewhere in your neighbourhood? 🌱 Plan to make a green roof on your shed/extension/garden studio? 🌱 Swap out your tarmac driveway with a water permeable alternative? 🌱 ✊Find out more at @Depavepdx and #FreeYourSoil !!! 🌼 Film taken at the wonderful @Broadmead wildflower installation and audio experience in the centre of Bristol’s busiest shopping district - Broadmead. 🍀 By bringing the sights, sounds, smells and lifeforce of a meadow back to where it once belonged, artists @CharliClarkArt and @sylviarimat helped the people of Bristol reimagine their city! What could yours look like with more soil and less concrete? 🤔 🔗 A massive thank you to @TheClimateApp for partnering with us once again, for the Our Earth Week 2025 daily challenge. This new app is designed to make cutting your carbon footprint more sociable and rewarding, so follow the link in our bio to download #TheClimateApp and get started! 💚 #OurEarthWeek #OEWChallenge #CommunityRadioEnvironmentNetwork #CREN #Broadmeadow #Broadmead

🇬🇲Dawda Cham is a Gambian environment and climate change activist and a Youth Representative for Gambia at this year’s COP, there to keep children and young people at the heart of climate decision-making and negotiations. ✊Dawda is also a member of @actnowfilm - a project by Cambridge Zero at the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at the University of Bath in the UK. Alongside colleagues from all over the world he was part of a Blue Zone panel discussion on “Inspiring Action through Building Youth Capacity.” #climateyouth #youthinclusion #youthleaders #cop30 #ourearthweek2025 #ourearthweek #connectinspireact #HotFromCOP

🌊OUR OCEANS are under threat from over-fishing, pollution, plastics, oil & mineral exploration and climate change. 🪸Today’s challenge is to join the global call to protect our oceans with @RiseUp4TheOcean @Oceana and @OceanaUK 🧜‍♂️Feel like ‘getting out and doing something’? Why not find your nearest beach clean through @SurfersAgainstSewage 🔗 All the links and information you need to find out more and to take action can be found on @theclimateapp - download the app (which helps motivate ongoing climate action) go to ‘Challenges’ and #OurEarthWeek2025 is top of the list in the ‘Voice It’ tab! Thanks for joining the global call to protect our oceans! #SaveOurSeas #PlasticFreeSeas #TheBottomLine #30x30 #BottomTrawling #MarineReserve #MarineProtectedAreas #OurEarthWeek2025 #OEWChallenge #CommunityRadioEnvironmentNetwork #CREN

🌊🐠🌊🪸🌊🐋🌊 awed, blissful, blue, boundless, briny, bubbly, calm, changeable chilly, cleansed, clear, connected, cosmic, dancey, dangerous, deep, dramatic, dreamy, elemental, enchanted, energised, enthralled, fathomless, fierce, formidable, frightened, frothy, glittering, glorious, grateful, high, humbled, hypnotised, inspired, invigorated, limitless, magnificent, meditative, melancholic, mesmerised, mysterious, old, peaceful, powerful, polluted, restless, rhythmic, salty, serene, stormy, swimmy, tempestuous, tiny, tumultuous, turbulent, twinkling, unfathomable, vast, wild, wondrous, xhilarated, yearning, young, Zen…🌊 🫧Wonder what answers will bubble up on all the #OurEarthWeek stations today? 🤔 🌊🐠🌊🪸🌊🐋🌊 #SaveOurSeas #OurEarthWeek2025 #OEWChallenge #CommunityRadioEnvironmentNetwork #CREN

💩On Friday @our.earth.week asked listeners to help #EndSewageDumping 💩In this clip we hear Julia Francois and Liz Banks- two members of Bristol’s coldwater synchro team, #AlmostSynchro - in conversation with #OEW founder Penny Southgate, and BCFM station manager, Pat Hart. Watch till the end for a clip of them all practicing in the studio! They talk about seeing ‘nasty debris’💩🧻 washed up on the shores of the River Avon at Conham after heavy rain, and how they, and many others, have become ill after swimming in the River Wye. 💩Almost Synchro @openwatersynchro have recently made a film with @canopyandstars featuring them swimming in hazmat suits to draw attention to the problem of sewage pollution in our waterways. You’ll find a link to the film in the comments below. 💩We can all contact our local political representatives to demand stricter laws to protect our rivers, lakes and seas from this outdated and dangerous practice of sewage dumping. Go to @surfersagainstsewage and @riveractionuk for more info on how to take action. 💩 You can hear the conversation in full by going to ‘listen again’ on the @bcfmradio website and looking for the One Love Breakfast show on 12/11/25. 💩🌊💩🌊💩🌊💩 #EndSewagePollution #RescueBritainsRivers #OurEarthWeek #OurEarthWeek2025 #OEWChallenge #CommunityRadioEnvironmentNetwork #CREN #DirtyWater

🌎 Today we are glad to welcome back Dr Filipé França *HOT FROM COP* speaking to Our Earth Week listeners. 🌏Yesterday Filipé was involved in talks about the impact of climate change on disease spread - particularly in the tropics. He also joined fellow @bristoluni_cabot_institute colleague, Dr Karen Tucker, on a panel, discussing how to decolonise relationships and strengthen collaborations between institutions in the Global South and Global North, and also between scientists and traditional communities. 🌍 Filipé is one of over 50,000 people attending this year’s climate talks from all over the world. Today he is at the People’s Summit - bringing together 1,000s of traditional communities and Indigenous Peoples at the Federal University of Pará. (Filipé is a biological scientist with research positions at Bristol University in the UK and the Federal University of Pará, in Belem (home of COP30), Brazil.) #COP30 #OurEarthWeek2025 #OurEarthWeek #ConnectInspireAct @bristoluni_cabot_institute @ecofilipe

HOT FROM COP! The wonderful @crenvironmentnetwork has been gathering audio reports from delegates at #COP30 in Brazil and broadcasting these on local radio stations for #OurEarthWeek. In this message is from Bristol University's Karen Tucker, we hear about the ‘Seventh Generation Principle’. 🐢This approach originates from Indigenous Peoples of North America (Turtle Island) and is now being used to represent Indigenous perspectives more widely. The principle ensures that decisions taken today do not negatively impact the next seven generations to come. 🪵 Karen also talks about discussions focussed on the threats to Indigenous lands, bodies and cultures from both climate change and the global responses to climate change, including carbon trading - subjects not usually covered in the official COP negotiations. For @ourearthweek , to correspond with COP, @crenvironmentnetwork has been supporting individual radio stations around the country to hold as conversations about how the climate crisis is affecting our communities. Have you heard features on your local station? If not, encourage them to get involved! Our Earth Weeks starts conversations at the hyper local scale, and connects them to global issues and debates. ✊✊✊ Photo by Rafael Neddermeyer/COP30

💩END SEWAGE POLLUTION! 🤢 Don’t worry, you’re not alone for the Day 5 of the Our Earth Week CHALLENGE - Together we can put an end to the revolting practice of sewage dumping into our rivers, lakes and seas! ✊ Find out how to contact your local representative to demand change and join up with local campaigns by checking out @SurfersAgainstSewage and @RiverActionNetwork 🔗 All the info you need to complete this challenge and find out more is also available on @TheClimateApp - it’s simple to download and makes taking action way more fun. Find OUR EARTH WEEK right at the top of the ‘Voice It’ Challenges in the app! 💩Meanwhile tune into @LakeDistrictRadio today to hear DJ Lee Durrant’s 24hr broadcast marathon. He’s ‘Pumping number twos into our ears not our lakes’ as part of Our Earth Week’s day of dirty water… 🗣️“I’ll be joined by guests including campaigners from #SaveWindermere, #SurfersAgainstSewage environmental experts and representatives from #UnitedUtilities to discuss the scale of water pollution and what can be done to protect local waterways,” Lee said. “If it gets people talking about what’s happening to our lakes, rivers and seas, it will be worth every minute.” 💩 Video taken at Combe Dingle in the Blaise Castle Estate, Bristol, showing a storm drain overflowing with raw sewage straight into the River Trym - January 2023. 💩💩💩💩💩💩 #EndSewagePollution #RescueBritainsRivers #OurEarthWeek #OurEarthWeek2025 #OEWChallenge #CommunityRadioEnvironmentNetwork #CREN #DirtyWater

🌎 In today’s HOT FROM COP message from Bristol University's Karen Tucker, we hear about the ‘Seventh Generation Principle’. 🐢This approach originates from Indigenous Peoples of North America (Turtle Island) and is now being used to represent Indigenous perspectives more widely. The principle ensures that decisions taken today do not negatively impact the next seven generations to come. 🪵 Karen also talks about discussions focussed on the threats to Indigenous lands, bodies and cultures from both climate change and the global responses to climate change, including carbon trading - subjects not usually covered in the official COP negotiations. 🌳 On Monday Indigenous protesters, carrying signs reading “Our Forests are Not For Sale”, broke through security at the COP30 venue. An Indigenous leader from the Tupinamba community cried out “We can't eat money!” Going on to say “We want our lands free from agribusiness, oil exploration, illegal miners and illegal loggers.” #COP30 #OurEarthWeek2025 #OurEarthWeek #ConnectInspireAct @bristoluni_cabot_institute @ecofilipe

🌏WATER CONNECTS US ALL! 🚱So much of the water we use goes unseen but has a big impact on others. 🍔Your CHALLENGE for Day 4 of Our Earth Week is to calculate your ‘Virtual Water Footprint’ - how much water is embedded in the food you eat, the clothes you wear, in your travel and leisure and your use of technology... 🤳Find out how to calculate your footprint on the @TheClimateApp and lots more info - download and follow the links to the Our Earth Week Challenge via the ‘Voice it’ tab... 🛶 Video taken on a tributary of the Tutoh River near Mulu National Park in Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo). This river is often choked by run-off from surrounding hills after rainstorms, as the earth is no longer held in place by intact forests - the timber is then exported across the world. This river and the surrounding homelands of the Penan, Berawan and Tering Peoples are now threatened by plans for a massive cascading dam. Only a third of the world’s rivers still flow unimpeded by dams and other infrastructure. #VirtualWaterFootprint #OurEarthWeek #OEWChallenge #CommunityRadioEnvironmentNetwork #CREN #connectinspireact